Michelle Knights, a third-year student at Rhodes University majoring in physics and maths, recently had her universe rocked when she won the European Space Agency’s Be an INTEGRAL Astronomer competition in the undergraduate category.
Michelle Knights, a third-year student at Rhodes University majoring in physics and maths, recently had her universe rocked when she won the European Space Agency’s Be an INTEGRAL Astronomer competition in the undergraduate category.
Knights fell in love with astronomy when she was six years old. Her father used to tell her about stars and help her identify constellations in the sky. "There’s a whole universe out there! I thought it was amazing," she recalls.
"I found out by email and I had to read it three times before it actually sunk in," says Knights. "I then ran through the house shouting to my digsmate and my boyfriend, ‘I won! I won! I won!"
The competition was organised by the European Space Agency to celebrate the 2009 International Year of Astronomy and was open to secondary school learners and undergraduate students from around the world.
Runners up in the undergraduate category were from universities in Italy, Taiwan, Spain and India. Knights will join the winner of the secondary school category, Shyamal Patel of Baroda High School in India, on a trip to the European Space Astronomy Centre in Spain next year.
Participants in the competition were asked to study, analyse and interpret data collected by the European INTEGRAL (International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory) space observatory of one of the most active regions at the centre of our galaxy, the Galactic Bulge.
Knights spent four months working on her report and says that she had to teach herself a lot of the techniques needed to analyse the data as she hadn’t learnt them in class yet.
"It was a great learning experience," she says. "I didn’t get much sleep the week before it was due though." Although Knights researched and analysed the data herself, she asked the head of the Rhodes physics department, Professor Steven Karataglidis, to look over her report before she submitted it.
"He basically tore it to shreds," she laughs, but adds that he helped make it "look and sound more like a scientific report".
Knights says the response to her achievement has been overwhelming and that she has received letters of congratulations from the National Research Foundation (NRF) and Square Kilometre Array (SKA) South Africa.
"It’s amazing to see South Africa be so positive about science. It’s easy to be negative about the country but I think there’s a lot to be positive about and I think we’re going to go far. I’m very proud to be a South African."
